My Worst Job

I usually really love my job, although I sometimes experience cell phone induced rage. The other day I had to ask five people in two hours to take their cell phones out of our quiet area (preferably to the trash compactor). Everyone I talked to was shocked and indignant that I would request that they to take their loud, cell phone using selves somewhere else to discuss their hot tubbing adventures. I was shocked and indignant that library patrons (library patrons) can't read signs that say No Cell Phone Use Allowed. I could really use a taser at work. Or muzzles. Or voodoo dolls. And, yes, I have a cell phone, but I use it VERY courteously.

So, I'm saying that my job is good (you maybe couldn't tell that that was the point for a minute), but I have had a couple of terrible jobs. The worst was a temporary job. I accepted it before the temp agency told me exactly where I'd be and what I'd be doing. I was directing phone calls. At a used Mack truck dealership.

Every day I worked there, I perched at my desk between fake plants, watching daytime talk shows on a teeny, tiny TV. Every hour or so a salesman would come lean on my desk and tell me dumb and/or sexist jokes. My supervisor was a woman named Tammy with long, bright red fingernails. She met me my first day and told me all about how she had a degree in fashion but had accepted her current position right after graduation and had been there for twenty years. Having just finished graduate school, this made me want to shave my head and enter a state of eternal mourning. I could see my future and it wore acrylic nails.

I stuck it out for as long as I could, which I believe was five days. Then I called the temp agency to tell them I couldn't work there anymore, called my friends in Indiana to say I was on my way to visit them, and left the state (just for a few days of Turkish food and thrift store shopping with the friends fortunate enough to still be IN grad school). And that is how I came to apply for my current job. I had a job that made me realize there were much worse things than ending up back in Utah. The end. Moral taught.*

Worst job experiences?

*In case you didn't catch that moral, it's that if your mother suggests you apply for jobs in Utah to, among other things, assist your pregnant sister and you resist, you will be punished by working in a used Mack truck dealership. Or at a Hummer dealership if there's not a Mack truck dealership handy.